The Moz Q&A Community

Hey friend! Have fun exploring Q&A, but in order to ask your own
questions, comment, or give thumbs up, you need to be logged in to your
Moz Pro account.
You can also earn access by receiving 500
MozPoints
from participating in YouMoz and the Moz Blog!

3 Responses

If your forum wasn't so well established, I would say change the URL of the forum homepage and you'll instantly 404 all of those crappy links and your problem would be solved with one quick change.

Since that is not an option, the best thing you can do is to notify Google that you are being attacked by someone attempting to get you penalized. Email them once every couple of weeks with updated information, for instance if you see your incoming links number going up dramatically from the last time you emailed them point that out.

Basically, if you send Google enough messages they may listen and flip some switch or raise some incoming link spam threshold on your site (no one knows exactly what they do, but they can manually adjust things)

I think because of the nature of your site, it is not hard to convince Google that there are people out to sabotage you since you are exposing already shady people.

Be proactive, and make Google aware that this is not you doing this before they penalize your site. Good luck.

Thanks. But here is the issue, contact who? The Google webmaster forum says there is nobody to specifically contact regarding these issues.

"First Google knows that you have no control over who links to your site and will not penalize a site for links from a spammy site. Looking at the pages that you listed those sites appear to have been hacked, there are 100's of hidden links on those pages. It is a little interesting that the hackers who hit those sites choose to include a link to your site along with the 100s of other sites. "

"First Google knows that you have no control over who links to your site and will not penalize a site for links from a spammy site. Looking at the pages that you listed those sites appear to have been hacked, there are 100's of hidden links on those pages. It is a little interesting that the hackers who hit those sites choose to include a link to your site along with the 100s of other sites. "

a) you absolutely can be penalized by the actions of others, it's just difficult and takes time and money and determination.

b) that's a PHP forum, it hasn't been hacked, the mod is just allowing anything and everything to be posted on there. Spammers sell link dumps to people who use throw away sites to spam for themselves, all of those peoples sites listed there paid a link builder to dump as many adult links as they can. It's incredibly cheap, you can get something like 4000 links for $20. It's totally automated using software. This throws you in the pool with many shady sites, I bet if I check those sites i'll see at least half of them are penalized.

Well Google makes it hard to contact them, don't use the paid link form. Contact them via reconsideration request in webmaster tools. Although it isn't a reconsideration request you're still talking to the people who have the power to forgive and manually reinclude sites who have been penalized.

Hey friend! Have fun exploring Q&A, but in order to ask your own
questions, comment, or give thumbs up, you need to be logged in to your
Moz Pro account.
You can also earn access by receiving 500
MozPoints
from participating in YouMoz and the Moz Blog!
Learn more.